Border Crisis

Floor Speech

Mr. CORNYN. Shifting to a different part of my State where they are experiencing another type of crisis, every day this week I have come to the floor and spoken on President Obama's refusal to travel to the southern border of Texas where a humanitarian crisis continues to unfold. Those aren't just my words; those are the President's words--a humanitarian crisis.

As I have said before, the President has been in Dallas; he has been in Austin, where he spent the night last night; and he is there this morning speaking, reportedly, on the economy. Why he persists in his refusal to travel to the border really is beyond my imagination. I just don't understand it. The fact that the President has himself described it as a humanitarian crisis makes this even more strange.

People can infer whatever they want to about his potential motivations. I don't know whether it means he doesn't really understand it, whether his handlers have kept him in the bubble so much that simply the facts are not getting through to him or whether he is surrounded by political advisers who say: This is going to be a political liability for you, Mr. President. Don't travel there. If you show up and have your picture taken with these children who are traveling by the tens of thousands unaccompanied from Central America to Mexico, you will own the problem. I don't know whether that is the advice he is getting. Surely it cannot be that he doesn't care.

But I will tell you that many of my constituents--Republicans and Democrats alike--and many of my colleagues in the Congress are wondering: Why would the President show such little respect for what the communities along the border are experiencing as they try to deal with this humanitarian crisis? Why would the President show such little respect for the Border Patrol, FEMA, and other Federal actors that are trying to help these communities deal with this crisis? It just does not add up.

Since the President so stubbornly refuses to visit the border even though he is in Texas and has been there for the last 2 days, people have asked me: Well, if the President showed up, what would he see?

First of all, he would learn this crisis is in large part a product of the President's own policy judgments, particularly starting with the ICE memo in 2011, the so-called Morton memo No. 1, then the Morton memo No. 2, and then the deferred action Executive order saying that certain young people would never be returned to their country of origin but the President will act alone to defer action against them.

Then there is the continued discussion the President has here in Washington that says he wants to go even further. So I think one of the things the President would learn is that people actually pay attention to what he is saying. The impression is that he is not going to faithfully execute the law.

So the children continue to come, and they will continue to come until we fix the problem. The President has to be an important part of that solution.

As I have said before, these young children traveled through some of the most dangerous territory on the planet, because the smuggling corridors are controlled by cartels such as the Zetas and these cartels are in the business of crime--smuggling people, drugs, weapons, you name it--smuggling women for sex slavery and human trafficking. They don't really care about the human element. They care about the money. Migrants who travel across Mexico from Central America are subjected to rape and kidnapping--where they are held for ransom so their relatives will pay off the cartels to let them go and continue their journey. We don't know how many of the children that start this long journey from Central America--some 1,200 miles from Guatemala City to McAllen, TX, alone--how many of them die in the process and never make it. So the 52,000-plus so far who have been detained at our southwestern border since October are the ones who made the trip successfully. We don't know how many children and their parents have died in the process.

I do know--having traveled to Brooks County, Texas--that I have seen some of the grave sites of unknown migrants who have actually died trying to get through--to get past the Border Patrol checkpoint at Falfurrias, for example. So I am sure, tragically, that many migrants don't make it and die in the process.

There is a powerful incentive for people to travel to the United States. Obviously, we understand people who want opportunity, people who are trying to flee violence. But the President has effectively encouraged children and their parents to make this treacherous, life-threatening journey by suggesting that he won't enforce the law. The President himself admits that even under his deferred action order--his Executive order that he issued in 2012--these children wouldn't be covered, but they come because they have the impression that they will be allowed to stay once they make it here.

The New York Times recently reported the story of one 13-year-old Honduran boy who was detained in Mexico trying to reach the United States. The Times reported that this young boy said his mother believed the Obama administration had quietly changed its policy with regard to unaccompanied minors and that if he made it across, he would have a better shot at staying. And, in fact, that is proving to be true.

So many of these children are now, because of a 2008 law, placed with relatives here in the United States who themselves may not be legally present. They are given a notice to appear for a subsequent court hearing and the overwhelming number of them never show up. Having done so, they have made it because we don't have the resources. We certainly don't have the laws on the books necessary to fill this hole that the cartels are exploiting and that is what we need to work on together as part of this supplemental appropriation to try to fix. We cannot just vote for more money when the cause of the problem that needs fixing remains unfixed.

The cartels are happy to tell parents: Yes, send your kids to America, turn them over to us, write us a check for $5,000--or whatever the amount is--and maybe they will be able to escape Central America and make it to the United States. For every one of the parents who take the cartels up on that deal, for every one of the children subjected to this horrific journey from Central America to the southern part of the United States, the cartels are making money. So as long as the hole in the 2008 law remains unfilled--and the President certainly hasn't requested we fix it, but we need to do that--we will keep spending billions of dollars, and we will continue to see the surge of unaccompanied minors continue to go up.

In 2011 there were about 6,000 unaccompanied minors detained at the southwestern border. But just since October there have been more than 50,000. So something is going on here, and this 13-year-old Honduran boy interviewed for the New York Times story said: ``Well, my mom thought President Obama was changing his policies and I would be able to stay if I made it.''

Since the President decided not to make the short trip from Austin or Dallas to McAllen, TX, I wanted to share a few stories about what I saw there when I visited. I had a chance to visit the McAllen Border Patrol station, one of the busiest and most crowded of the facilities which are trying to deal with this surge of unaccompanied minors. I met another 13-year-old boy who had just arrived from Central America. We asked him to come out of the detention cell that was so jam-packed with teenage boys that nobody even had space to lay down and sleep. I hate to think about how unhygienic those circumstances are. But this young 13-year-old boy--we asked him, through a wonderful young woman who works with me in my Harlingen general office in South Texas who asked him in Spanish: ``Where are your parents?'' He said, ``They are both dead.'' It was heartbreaking. I think the President would benefit from seeing and talking to young victims of this trafficking like this Honduran boy.

As I said, inside these facilities there are dozens of children packed into holding cells, with one toilet, that are meant for just a few people. There were young women only 15 years of age who were pregnant, some of whom already had babies that they were nursing. The babies were clothed only in diapers and sleeping on cement floors. Unless you see it for yourself, I don't think you get a full appreciation of the nature and scope of this process. That is something I think the President could benefit from.

Conditions are so bad they are housing people in a garage at the Border Patrol facility. I don't have to tell the Presiding Officer, but it is hot in Texas in July, and you can imagine what the conditions are like in that garage. There must have been 100 people basically sitting or standing on that garage floor because they simply don't have the capacity to deal with them.

They simply don't have the capacity to deal with them, and they certainly don't have the capacity to deal with the numbers that are coming through.

I wish to do something that I wish the President of the United States would do in person by traveling to McAllen. I wish to thank the Border Patrol and the leadership of Chief Kevin Oaks, who has been doing a magnificent job under very difficult circumstances. I thank all of the Border Patrol--FEMA and other Federal employees--who are down there trying to help the local community and the State of Texas deal with this crisis.

Chief Oaks has maybe one of the toughest jobs on the planet these days. He is in charge of Rio Grande Valley sector. It encompasses more than 1,700 square miles in 19 Texas counties. It shares 320 river miles with Mexico and 250 coastal miles. This is the sector through which this flood of humanity is coming. They have detained 418,000 people last year alone. That number is growing, and they are mainly coming through the Rio Grande sector--418,000 people from 100 different countries.

If you go to Brooks County and look at some of the rescue beacons--they have actually put out rescue beacons. If an immigrant is so sick or suffering from exposure or dehydrated, they can hit the rescue beacon and a light will go off and the Border Patrol will rescue them. If they are at risk of losing their lives, sure, they may not want to be caught, but they would rather be caught than die due to exposure. Those rescue beacons are not just written in Spanish and English, they are also written in Chinese.

Yesterday I said I don't know a lot of Chinese speakers from Brooks County, TX. It is a small rural county. The reason that rescue beacon is written in Chinese, among other languages, is because people can come from all over the world through the southern border of Mexico into the United States. There were 418,000 people detained from more than 100 countries. Admittedly, most were from Mexico and Central America, but they also come from nations that are state sponsors of international terrorism, which is why General Kelly, the head of Southern Command, said this is a national security threat.

The President would learn more about this if he took the trouble to go to the border and talk to people such as Chief Oaks and learn of the challenges they dealing with day in and day out. They are doing the best they can, but they simply don't have the resources or the manpower to handle this influx, particularly of unaccompanied children.

I am told that because the Border Patrol has to deal with these children and make sure they are taken care of--which they should be--they are not interdicting illegal drugs coming across the border, and that should concern all of us.

I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Booker). Without objection, it is so ordered.

Mr. CORNYN. I thank my colleague from Maine for his courtesy.

This is something I hope my colleagues who have not spent as much time thinking about this--and that is logical because they don't come from a State contiguous to the Mexican border or Central America and South America, but they need to know the facts, that these areas are now controlled by cartels and transnational criminal organizations.

One official from the mayor's office in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, reported--when talking about the cartels that control the smuggling--that in his city ``the Zetas control all trafficking, sending men to recruit women in Central America and sometimes even kidnapping migrant women riding the

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buses. They sell the women to truck drivers for a night and then throw them away like unwanted scraps.''
The bottom line is there is nothing humane and nothing compassionate about encouraging people to travel through cartel-dominated smuggling routes in hopes of reaching the United States only to find out our law does not permit them to stay. There is nothing humane about that. There is nothing compassionate about that. Yet that is the impression. Nobody should be traveling to America this way and especially not young children.

This is something the President of the United States needs to see. If it is serious enough for him to call this a humanitarian crisis and ask Congress to appropriate more than $3 billion on an emergency basis to help pay for additional capacity, it is serious enough to warrant his personal attention. I just don't get it. I really don't.

I had an occasion to work with President Obama when he was in the Senate. I see him less often now that he is over in that big house on Pennsylvania Avenue, but that doesn't strike me as who he is. I wonder what in the world could be going on. Is he too wrapped up with living in his bubble? I guess all Presidents have experienced that. He needs to break out of the bubble and find out what is actually happening on the ground. At the very least, I would think the President would want to take the opportunity to say thank you to Chief Oaks, the Border Patrol, FEMA, and other Federal agencies that are trying to help local communities.

The invitation still stands. I think the President is still in Austin speaking at the Paramount Theater in my hometown where I live now, but he is talking about the economy instead of talking about this crisis. I bet the invitation still stands for him to take the short trip to McAllen and about an hour out of his day to say thank you to the Border Patrol and other Federal agencies and see for himself this unfolding--and I would say escalating--humanitarian crisis.

I thank the Chair and the Senator from Maine for his courtesy.

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